10 ms·
The Malware Museum
- krzrak 11y agoI remember back in the 90s, demonstration of the viruses (with all animations, music, etc.) was one of the coolest features of popular Polish antivirus mks_vir.
- nathell 11y agoMks_vir, especially its DOS incarnations from its heyday back when it was developed by Marek Sell himself, definitely deserves much more international publicity than it got.
- int0x80 11y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/350/ https://xkcd.com/350/
- Roritharr 11y agoSomeone really should build this. I'd pay handsomely for an easy to setup linux version that i could just boot on a beefy machine and keep running as an installation like that.
- slipstream- 11y agoSomeone did try (I believe it was called wecanhasthetechnology or something), but it didn't last long.
- homarp 11y agohttp://www.brianlinkletter.com/open-source-network-simulators/ http://www.brianlinkletter.com/open-source-network-simulator... ?
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoMost antivirus/security firms have a similar kind of network where they analyze samples. It's detached from the internet to avoid spreading the infections, but they usually have mechanisms to emulate being online, etc.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoIt kind of depends on the systems (you can run a number of 640K DOS boxes in a simulator though :-) and virii of this period tended to make the boxes break so it wasn't really something that a flock would keep going.
- contingencies 11y agoThis XKCD is a likening of the very established notion of a honeynet with an acquarium. If you want to set one up there are good open source tools available, but you will want to be quite careful to comprehend what you are doing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_%28computing%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_%28computing%29
- punnerud 11y agoViruses were so much better before https://archive.org/details/malware_ZOHRA.COM https://archive.org/details/malware_ZOHRA.COM
- morsch 11y agoThat's just what early MS DOS looked like.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoReminds me of danooct1's work on YouTube. He does videos of DOS (and Win9x) viruses.
- chippy 11y agoImagine being a virus writer crafting a virus so complicated that it would only work in a future not written different kind of OS or virtual machine, and work in differing operating systems, and identify and poke for weaknesses by itself. Perhaps it would just be a Science Fiction plot device!
- ivanca 11y agoWell, something more nefarious is already possible with a bit of money. Someone could hide a few armed drones set to wake up 100 years from now, setted up to shoot everyone they find. The perfect crime in the sense that police can't capture him if he is already dead.
- bitwize 11y agocough Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow cough
- Vespasian 11y agoLuckily this seems not easy. Mechanical parts do not like being unmaintained for decades, while being stored in a damp/sandy/cold/hot environment. Batteries, solar cells and other means of stored energy are not to fond of that either. A virus on the other hand that inserts itself for example into source code could very well live a long time.
- libeclipse 11y agoThat's the kind of thinking suicide bombers have.
- david-given 11y agocough Arthur C Clarke's _3001_ cough
- NoGravitas 11y agoOr _Independence Day_.
- luso_brazilian 11y agoBack in the days a lot of thought and ingenuity was put into making these viruses. For instance, the Friday 13th [1][2][3] virus: * was only 419 bytes long * infected both .COM and .EXE, increasing the size of the former by only 1813 bytes * on infection, became memory resident (using only 2kb of memory) * hooked itself into interrupt processing and other low level DOS services to, for instance, suppress the printing of console messages in failure cases (like trying to to infect a file on a read-only floppy disk) * activated itself every friday 13th and deleted programs used that day It still managed to spread itself worldwide (mostly via floppy disk sharing as the world wide web didn't exist yet) and went mainstream enough for the broadcast news to advise people not to turn on their computers on that date or to push the date one day ahead. All that in 419 bytes, about a third of the size of this post. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_%28computer_virus%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_%28computer_virus%29 [2] https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/jerusale.shtml https://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/jerusale.shtml [3] http://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/malware/famous-virus-history-friday-13th/ http://www.pandasecurity.com/mediacenter/malware/famous-viru...
- sillysaurus3 11y agoabout a third of the size of this post. This was a delightful comparison. It didn't really sink in until you said that.
- laacz 11y agoOr three tweets, if you did not try squeezing it inside multi-byte characters.
- kenbellows 11y agoSomebody tweet it!
- sarciszewski 11y agoIt's raw binary. The best way would be to base64 encode it and break it into four tweets.
- anjc 11y agoThis fills me with all sorts of romantic nostalgia.
- Kristine1975 11y agoThe good old days... when viruses merely displayed a funny message or erased your hard disk, but didn't turn your computer into part of a botnet controlled by organized crime.
- eric-hu 11y agoThere was an insidious period when viruses would attempt to flash the bios with garbage, rendering the computer useless. I heard that some crafty individuals would recover by purchasing a motherboard of the same model, swapping the bios chip to boot up, hot swapping the old chip back and then reflashing the old chip with a good bios. After that, you could also reinstall the new bios chip in the motherboard and return it, slightly used. I'll take a botnet computer over a bricked one any day.
- kosma 11y agoI'll take a trashed BIOS over a backdoored BIOS any day. Firmware viruses are a very real threat today.
- nickysielicki 11y agoIf anyone feels like researching this, don't look at the BadBios conspiracy, that's an internet meme. Instead look at things like Intel's trusted computing. Igor Skochinsky (of fame from Hexrays / IDA, and moderator on /r/reverseengineering) has an excellent powerpoint highlighting some research on their Management Engine, which is probably in your computer right now. pdf: https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5BBreakpoint%5D%20Intel%20ME%20-%20Two%20Years%20Later.pdf https://github.com/skochinsky/papers/raw/master/2014-10%20%5...
- hartpuff 11y agoA bricked computer isn't as likely to empty your bank account though.
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm imagining the iFixit instructions for this on an iMac.
- jrcii 11y agoI remember this ezine 40Hex used to have virus assembly in it, which to my 12 year old self was pretty much the coolest thing I could imagine, until I compiled and accidentally ran it and destroyed my parents Windows 98 installation.
- mikkohypponen 11y agoI believe I have a full collection of the 40Hex zines. Maybe I should add them to this archive.
- tribe 11y agoPlease do, I think that they would make a great addition.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jrcii 11y agoJason Scott has some too, I'm not sure how complete his collection is http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/ http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/40HEX/
- EvanAnderson 11y agoIt looks to be complete. Dark Angel's virus writing guides ("ps_vir..." files here http://textfiles.com/virus/ http://textfiles.com/virus/) are good for some nostalgia, too.
- ssharp 11y agoI remember actually getting infected with one of these when I was a teenager. From what I recall, it was mostly harmless. Me and some friends pooled together and bought a couple of CD-ROM's full of warez from some guy we found online and one of the games or applications was infected. Looking back, I'm actually pretty more all of them weren't infected!
- slipstream- 11y agoA long shot, but just in case... Even shady 1990s warez CDs need to be preserved :)
- PeekPoke 11y agoI wrote an AV Scanner (for the lulz) in the early 1990's and ended working at Symantec for my sins. Some of the programs were seriously well coded with self-hamming code, polymorphism, multi-partite capabilities, etc. Some of my favourites were the 'Eddie' series - written by a Bulgarian guy with a liking for Iron Maiden. :)
- bad_alloc 11y agoIf you're interested in this stuff, there#s also an awesome archive at VX Heaven [1], which not only includes malware sources but also a lot of documentation, simulators etc. [1] http://vxheaven.org/ http://vxheaven.org/
- Isamu 11y agoI used to collect these too! Thanks for posting! I'll have to look to see if there are any familiar boot sector viruses - the kind that propagated via floppies. Those made the rounds at work. I enjoyed disassembling them and seeing how they work. It was an education that kids miss out on today. Come to think of it, back when I was teaching a Perl class one of my first assignments was to create a "virus" that found Perl scripts and copied itself into them. Good times.
- annnnd 11y agoWhat a great compilation! I would love to know what harmful effects they had though. It is quite a difference if the virus is erasing your HDD while it is slowly printing the nice message or not...
- api 11y agoMalware back then was usually pranks. Today it's mostly run by organized crime. Money changes everything. I wrote DOS viruses when I was fifteen or sixteen. Most of them didn't do anything or did silly little pranks, but it's how I learned X86 ASM.
- xuhu 11y agoAn F-PROT v2 with its virus descriptions running in em-dosbox would be an appropriate addition to those viruses: http://patraulea.com/fprot/ http://patraulea.com/fprot/
- nikolay 11y agoIn the early 90s, I created a stealth benign virus in just 127 bytes. Good old times! Back then, one of the most amazing virus was Whale [0]! [0]: http://www.mycal.net/Group42/virus/40hex/40hex22.htm http://www.mycal.net/Group42/virus/40hex/40hex22.htm
- ommunist 11y agoSweet days, when your OS was larger than your virus.
- mperham 11y agoSadly due to copyright law, malware is one of the safest things to publish. Who's going to bring a copyright claim?
- nchelluri 11y agoThis is awesome. But, I was really hoping for Stoned. It was the first virus I got. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_%28computer_virus%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_%28computer_virus%29